Wednesday Afternoon Book Club

January 25, 2023
When:
January 24, 2024 @ 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm
2024-01-24T13:30:00-05:00
2024-01-24T15:00:00-05:00
Wednesday Afternoon Book Club

The Wednesday Afternoon Book Club meets on the 4th Wednesday at 1:30pm, except for November which meets on the 3rd Wednesday.

January 24, 2024 – The Measure. By Nikki Erlick
Eight ordinary people. One extraordinary choice.
It seems like any other day. You wake up, pour a cup of coffee, and head out.
But today, when you open your front door, waiting for you is a small wooden box. This box holds your fate inside: the answer to the exact number of years you will live.
From suburban doorsteps to desert tents, every person on every continent receives the same box. In an instant, the world is thrust into a collective frenzy. Where did these boxes come from? What do they mean? Is there truth to what they promise?
As society comes together and pulls apart, everyone faces the same shocking choice: Do they wish to know how long they’ll live? And, if so, what will they do with that knowledge?

February 28, 2024 – The woman in the white komino.  by Ana Johns

Japan, 1957. Seventeen-year-old Naoko Nakamura’s prearranged marriage would secure her family’s status in their traditional Japanese community, but Naoko has fallen for another man—an American sailor—and to marry him would bring great shame upon her family. When it’s learned Naoko carries the sailor’s child, she is cast out in disgrace, forced to make unimaginable choices with far-reaching consequences.

America, present day. Tori Kovac finds a letter containing a shocking revelation about her father—one that calls into question everything she understood about her family and herself. Setting out to learn the truth behind the letter, Tori’s journey leads her halfway around the world to a remote seaside village in Japan, where she must confront the demons of the past to pave a way for redemption.

March 27, 2024 – The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel by James McBride (Author)
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.

March 27 – ‘Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers,’ by Jesse Q. Sutanto
When 60-year-old widow Vera Wong finds a man’s body on the floor of her San Francisco teahouse, the police say it’s an accidental death. But the plain-spoken Vera firmly believes that the man was murdered, and she fearlessly sets out to find the killer, using her specially chosen teas and home-cooked meals as bait. As she did in her best-selling “Dial A for Aunties,” Sutanto uses her Indochinese heritage to add further interest to a fast-paced and often hilarious mystery.

View the full Library Calendar